Your Grace, Please Stop Poking Me

Elkas’s temperament was, to put it kindly, straightforward, and to put it bluntly, inflexible. He was sincere enough in love to swear he would never embrace another woman unless she was the one he had set his heart on.

Therefore, he shook his head at friends who urged him to use his charm to indulge in nighttime pleasures, saying it was absolutely out of the question.

<Isn’t that obvious?>

To his friend’s question, which he clearly dismissed as a joke, Elkas expressed his opinion with a serious face.

Elkas couldn’t understand men who kept separate households after marriage or who swung their lower halves around freely, thinking it didn’t matter since they weren’t married yet.

How could they embrace the noble body of the woman they loved with such an unclean body?

Though he spoke vaguely, like grasping at clouds, he actually had one woman in mind when he said this. Evelyn Windelson. His first love.

Friends who heard this once made strange expressions, like they’d heard something bizarre.

This was a country where keeping many women was considered an ability, not a flaw. In other words, in the world of men, Elkas was a man who didn’t live up to his face value, his size, or his c*ck.

However, no matter what other men in the world were like, Elkas kept his beliefs.

And then that incident happened.

The one incident that shocked Elkas, who had been preaching only true love, occurred the year he held his coming-of-age ceremony.

Even when his friends lost their virginity, he insisted on his purity. Few men could understand his old-fashioned ideology that relations should only be had with the woman who would become his wife, who would trust and follow him.

Until then, his friends thought his beliefs stemmed from his lack of experience with women.

Guessing that he would understand them once he experienced *ntercourse, they couldn’t stand watching him trapped in such rigid, outdated thinking and devised a scheme.

The method they came up with after long thought, supposedly for his sake, was quite mischievous.

Firmly believing that if Elkas tasted the pleasure of holding a woman he would abandon his stuffy temperament, they deliberately got Elkas thoroughly drunk, then pushed a stunningly beautiful courtesan into his room.

<Don’t worry. From now on, he’ll only look for me.>

The woman, said to possess alluring bedroom skills, confidently answered that there had never been a man she couldn’t seduce and pocketed a bag full of gold coins.

Though Elkas had a high tolerance for alcohol, he had no way to withstand friends who deliberately plied him with drinks and had lost consciousness.

However, he snapped awake at the chilling sensation of someone unbuckling him in his sleep and fumbling at his groin.

Elkas, his mind suddenly alert, tried to get up immediately, but his intoxicated body moved more slowly than usual. Through his blurred vision, Elkas spotted the woman busily undoing his lower half and shouted, mixing in an angry roar.

The woman flinched at Elkas’s fierce momentum upon waking, contrary to the client’s assurance that he’d be passed out until morning, but she displayed her skilled work ethic and raised the corners of her red lips seductively.

Having received money, her position was that she had to seduce him somehow.

The moment he saw the n*ked woman, Elkas easily grasped the situation, but his alcohol-laden body couldn’t react immediately. However, when he absolutely couldn’t tolerate such behavior and was forcibly raising his swaying upper body through willpower:

Just then, his lower garment was completely removed by the woman’s hands and his *rect flesh popped out.

That’s when the woman’s fingertips, about to confidently open her lips and swallow it in one gulp, froze in midair. The woman’s confident expression changed completely.

The woman blinked her eyes, wondering if she too was drunk, and gulped. Though it had swelled up on its own due to intoxication, it wasn’t a fully *rect member.

Nevertheless, even to the woman’s eyes, having witnessed countless men’s things, there was no disagreement that Elkas’s genitals were of exceptional size.

So this is why his friends readily offered that large sum.

There was no way Elkas missed the woman’s face gradually turning pale.

Reading the confusion that seeped into the woman’s eyes, seemingly unable to dare attempt it, Elkas exhaled an irritated breath and growled.

He was a man who growled fiercely enough to make one’s legs go weak right after waking up.

The woman, trembling as she forced her fingers, frozen from being seized by intimidation, to move, interpreted that warning somehow and soon turned deathly pale and kicked the door open to leave.

While Elkas had the murderous thought of killing all the friends who orchestrated this, he recalled the expression the frightened woman showed just before leaving.

In truth, he had no intention of holding a courtesan or anything, so it didn’t matter. However, the problem was that even a courtesan, worn and jaded from seeing male genitals to the point of exhaustion, looked at him with eyes filled with shock.

After that incident, his friends never orchestrated such behavior again, but the incident left Elkas with a kind of trauma. The situation of the first night after marrying Evelyn suddenly appeared before his eyes.

Like the woman who left looking at him like a beast, he worried that Evelyn, small and pure like a glass figurine, might look at him like a beast and be afraid.

And now that the incident at the banquet hall had finally erupted, Evelyn’s surprised face lingered before his eyes like an afterimage.

Elkas’s brow furrowed intensely with self-loathing.

“Why did it have to grow in that place?”

He had some idea why. His particularly healthy body swelled uncontrollably in size whenever he thought of one woman.

Getting *rections at any time was fine as long as he didn’t show it, as he’d always done, but he never imagined he’d react immediately just from facing Evelyn.

Not only that, far from showing signs of subsiding even now, his lower body’s reaction, which couldn’t easily cool down, was honest.

“Think positively. At least she didn’t catch on there. If the lady had realized, it would have been an even more awkward situation, so this is fortunate.”

Like Aiden said, it was extremely fortunate that Evelyn hadn’t noticed that far. If she’d known the truth, she would have looked back with even more contemptuous eyes.

If that had happened, instead of just worrying here and now, all his plans up to this point would have been ruined.

“What should I do? Should I visit Windelson right now and explain it was a misunderstanding?”

“Hey, calm down. Look at the time.”

Aiden, gesturing at the grandfather clock announcing midnight, spoke in a calm voice.

“The situation seems to have appeared as though the lady of Windelson committed a discourtesy, so it’s better to just let that matter pass.”

“If Evelyn gets into trouble because of me… That’s the real problem.”

What stopped Elkas from immediately standing up, saying that was even more unacceptable, was Aiden’s next words.

“That’s why going now would only backfire. Since we don’t know what the lady thinks of you… For now, it’s better to leave it to time and promise a natural meeting next time.”

After considering for a moment, Elkas decided to follow Aiden’s words.

Unlike Elkas, who froze in front of women, Aiden mingled well with women through his sociable eloquence and easygoing personality, so his advice was worth following.

Watching Elkas’s expression finally relax, Aiden suddenly became curious.

If the lady learned that the Duke of Berenberg’s true nature was actually such an innocent man, would she like it or dislike it?

* * *

Evelyn, who received a two-week house arrest along with orders to exercise restraint for a while due to the incident at the banquet hall, stayed quiet to avoid her parents’ eyes as much as possible.

But after a week passed, she felt like she’d die from frustration.

Climbing through the window wasn’t a problem, but the issue was that she couldn’t pass through the main gate. The sentries who had certainly received her father’s orders would absolutely not let Evelyn out.

Fortunately, the plan to visit the Duke the next day and apologize was resolved by news that flew in from the ducal residence that morning.

It was a letter saying not to worry because the Duke didn’t mind that matter at all. Her parents’ scolding stopped with that, but the house arrest wasn’t lifted.

‘If only I hadn’t been caught there, I could have snuck out at night.’

The walls of Count Windelson’s estate were high, but if you passed through the back garden and through the courtyard, there was a small hole hidden by vines.

When she was young, she often went out through there, but after ‘that day’ when she nearly died, the enraged Count blocked it, so now it was impossible to pass through.

One way or another, she had to be trapped here for another week without any way out.

“This is all because of that strange Duke. He poked me and then what was with that flustered face?”

Resentment toward that man, who wasn’t even present, rose for no reason.

The more she recalled that day, the more she was filled only with resentment toward him, the root cause of her house arrest.

“What kind of situation is it to do something strange and then be surprised yourself?”

Fuming, Evelyn crossed her arms tightly and recalled the man’s face. The more she reconsidered, the stranger the man was.

Recalling the moment when his blue-gray eyes, which seemed deep enough to be profound, widened at her outcry, he looked like the more flustered person.

Though she was the one actually flustered, seeing his eyes shake, soaked in bewilderment, somehow felt pitiful, so he did seem quite surprised.

“Could it not have been that person?”

Looking at her parents’ fuss and public opinion, he absolutely wasn’t that kind of person, but had she accused the wrong person?

Though that might be true, there had been only one man positioned right behind Evelyn at the time.

Evelyn shook her head to cast off the weak thought that crept up. For now, that man was the most likely culprit.

“Popo. Don’t you think it was definitely that man too?”

The subject she addressed while crouching near the flower bed was a snow-white cat.

She’d rescued Popo, who had nearly died in the city streets when he had been young, brought him to the Count’s residence, and he was now one of the animals she was responsible for protecting.

Unlike the other docile creatures, Popo was one who ran away at every opportunity, and thanks to that, it was Evelyn’s lot to have her heart drop every time she encountered Popo in completely unexpected places.

Popo, who had been purring and rubbing his cheek against Evelyn’s skirt, soon lay down flat in the middle of the flower bed, seemingly bored.

As flowers more delicate than his small body were crushed all at once, Evelyn, startled, hastily stretched out her arms.

“Ah! No! Popo. Those are Mother’s precious tulips.”

Popo nimbly dodged Evelyn’s urgently extended hand and immediately rolled over to rub his back.

With that action, flowers that had bloomed voluptuously in upright postures broke and were crushed, and the evenly laid soil became a mess.

Evelyn’s face turned pale. It was already too late to fix.

Her mother, who detested cats, got furiously angry every time Evelyn brought home stray animals one by one.

She’d gathered them in one place to avoid notice as much as possible, but thinking there would be an uproar if her mother found out she’d also ruined the garden, Evelyn looked around with a face not knowing what to do.

Let’s run away.

The decision was quick, and her agility in flattening her upper body and curling her back into a ball was also nimble.

If I do this, I won’t be seen.